Interesting column about Nazi collaborators

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From David Aaronovitch, in the Times. www.thetimes.co.uk/article/we-can-never-be-sure-wed-be-the-good-guys-mt0rbqxpn?shareToken=d91af49e9cd7dcc158e747d673e43ff3

Aaronovitch suggests that we can never be sure that we’d be the good guys, and that many would collaborate either willingly or passively and it stuck me that in terms of women’s rights that it’s all ready happened.

We’ve been invaded, our institutions have been captured and yet it is feminists who are viewed with suspicion. The collaborators gleefully inform on the resisters for woke points while the resistance is confined and controlled fearing for their jobs and personal safety.

How interesting that it’s the feminists who are often referred to as Nazis.

Are you comparing gender critical feminists to victims of genocide?

I think the closest comparison would be to the resistance.

Though for obvious reasons, that was higher risk. Perhaps then, GC feminists are akin to those who objected when it still carried a personal risk, but before the risks involved possible death/imprisonment.

SaskiaRembrandt
I know how the Nazis came to power

Excuse me, but we are not school children waiting to be educated.

There is no hierarchy to suffering.

The linked article is about Nazi Germany and the Second World War.
I have often thought about this. There were truly some people who did resist, even in Germany, and were killed for it (such as Sophie Scholl).
I think if I was living in a country that was occupied by Nazi Germany, say France, or even the Channel Islands, then I would like to think I would be a member of the resistance, etc, or harbour a Jewish family, etc.
In truth, I think I would probably be too scared to be that resistant.
I hope I would not be a collaborator, or someone who denounced others. I think am more likely to be someone who just kept their head down.
However, I am always comforted by the fact that some people DID resist, some people DID harbour Jewish Families, so maybe there would be more awareness now.

The target of genderism is women in general.

Genderism involves sterilising people who are identified during adolescence and childhood and directed into medical pathways, including experimental drug treatments and surgeries, which are outside the usual norms and ethics of medicine in the U.K.

Looking at past societies which promoted eugenics and the power of the state over family life seems relevant.

As poorly as gender critical feminists are being treated, they are not the ones who are being put through surgery, like the young women with Down’s syndrome was.

Ultimately though it is social media that is transforming these issues, and there will presumably be other huge social transformations brought about by it. Big institutions like medicine seem unable to stand up to it.

'Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.'

We have to be able to discuss all this, consider echoes, links and parallels. That is how we can try to avoid similar situations from happening again.

It doesn't mean we are 'comparing' victims. And certainly doesn't mean we're diminishing anyone's suffering.

The rise of safe spaces, avoidance of 'triggering' and offense and so on is also part of this - it's a dampening of debate, a fear of criticism, a general restriction in our ability to share and discuss ideas (and I don't see any wildly controversial or offensive ideas here, either.)

Having said that, the most prominent gender critical feminists are out lesbians, so would have been targets in Nazi Germany.

In the column, Aaronovitch himself writes:

"We don’t need here to stick to the Nazis. In a way they have become an unhelpful exaggeration whose sins are so monstrous they obscure other less but pernicious tendencies. It’s not just who would go Nazi, but who gets to work for the NKVD? For Chavez’s revolutionary cadres? For the committee of public safety at the height of the Terror? Who agitates to expel the Rohingya, who locks up the Uighurs, who agitates for the innocence of Radovan Karadzic, who argues for Hindutva in Modi’s India?"

So no, this isn't just about who would be a Nazi. It's about who would be complicit in all kinds of evil. And I think there's a real complacency at the moment, unfortunately, about just how dangerous trans activism is. These are people who are actively trying to stop meetings taking place, trying to get women fired from their jobs, having women removed from social media, threatening women with sexual violence and murder. There are plenty of supposedly progressive, liberal-minded people who are siding with this ideology without, apparently, expressing any qualms for what activists are doing. Fascism doesn't have to lead to genocide to still be identifiable as fascism. And this is exactly what trans activism is: fascism.

Fascism doesn't have to lead to genocide to still be identifiable as fascism.

As has been said frequently - everything that happened up until particular points was legal. Democide included.

It's one of the reasons that International Human Rights and then Women's Rights as we know them had the drive for formalisation after this experience. @RosaFreedman1983 's overview to the Edinburgh event is an outstanding summary. From approx. 3 mins in to 11 mins:

I am a passive collaborator in the real world - or at least at work and on the part of my social media where I interact with people I genuinely know and who know my real name - because I work for an organisation which has been utterly captured, and I cannot afford to lose my job. I haven't protested our trans policy and I don't raise these issues with my colleagues.

My small act of rebellion is to have a Twitter account in a completely false name with a burner email and my account here which is again unlinked to my real-world identity, where I try to share some GC sanity and help expose this ideology to the sunlight it so desperately needs. But with a disabled DH to support and a mortgage to pay, if it came down to it IRL at the moment I'm ashamed but realistic enough to say that they'd be holding up however many fingers they want me to say they're holding up. I'd love to pretend I'd be stronger and resist but I know my limits.

Me too tit. I do what I can to raise awareness under a pseudonym, but I risk disciplinary action & an end to my career if I speak the truth at work.

That's the parallel for me. Not being able to speak the truth for fear of reprisal.

I hope people read the article before writing off this discussion as its about tyranny, not just Fascism; not just in Nazi Germany, but also Soviet Russia and elsewhere.

I'm the granddaughter of people who survived The Holocaust. My older relatives taught me that we each have a duty to our ancestors, our descendants, and ourselves to understand the process by which tyranny is normalised.
Tyranny is acted out by normal everyday people like you and me. Not monsters. It happens by a step by step process;

1. Obey authority
2. Divide the community into 'us' and 'them''
3. Give the order 'do them harm'
4. Label everyone who disobeys the order as 'collaborators with them'
5. Exterminate 'them'.

kottke.org/16/11/five-steps-to-tyranny

Our society is currently at stage 4. This should concern all of us.

Iceberg, I have been lurking on this site for a year or two and been 'peak transed' and deeply shocked many times by what I have read. However, nothing has brought home the truth of the situation to me more than your post. I completely understand your position, it must be tearing you up inside to be (on the surface) going along with the insanity. This really IS how bad things get a stranglehold on society. I'm glad you have an outlet to unload some of the frustration you probably feel, but how you cope surrounded by dangerous idiots on a daily basis I cannot imagine. There must be thousands of sensible, silenced people like you having to put up with this nonsense everywhere, and that is the real tradgedy.

Thank you for getting it Gorse. It could be worse - at present it is only 'suggested' that we include our pronouns on our email signatures so I quietly don't, and I don't work directly with anyone trans so I don't have to perform hypocrisy. I try very hard not to get drawn into anything where I would be actively making things worse for women, hence the "passive". Tiny acts of silent rebellion.

It truly sucks OP, doesn't it? I like my job, I like my immediate colleagues. I hate the wokebros up the chain who let Stranswall - as I think of them - deliver so-called E&D training and turn our toilets gender neutral. (I managed to be on leave when my department's training took place. It's compulsory across the organisation so I'm supposed to arrange to travel to another office to join another cohort. I haven't yet, I'm just keeping quiet and 'forgetting to get round to it' for as long as I can. Tiny acts of silent rebellion.)

Thank you for so many thoughtful posts.
Iceberg, I suspect that your experience is shared by many many women and men working in the public services, local government, the NHS and in fact any workplace where activist groups have been allowed to peddle this ideology.
Very frightening times.

I dont think it's that much of a stretch. All of these movements start somewhere.
In the last year alone, we've seen:

1. book burnings and publications being withdrawn
2. the harassment and attempted firing of academics, including physical e.g. Rosa Freedman's door being pissed on
3. Journalists being harassed and blacklisted, even physically attacked e.g. the attack on Julie Bindel
4. The misrepresentation of science to represent an oppressed group as privileged ('cis women') along with the dehumanizing language justifying violence against them (e.g the 1000s of calls to violence evidenced on the terfisaslur website)
5. Physical intimidation to try stop an oppressed group from organising and meeting e.g all the aggression aimed at Womens Place such as the banging on the windows, screaming, bomb threats etc
6. Insistence on no platforming and removal of free speech for ideological opponents
7. Medicalisation of gender non-conforming children
8. Targeting of LGB people, particularly lesbians and framing them as 'deviant'. e.g calling lesbians 'vagina festishists'
9. Rewriting history and abuse of anyone who says otherwise e.g. erasure of Storme Delaverie's part in the Stonewall riots, recasting every woman who bucked against gender stereotypes as really a man (such as James Barry)

10. Attempting to remove legal protections against vulnerable people without due process e.g. casting self-id as not affecting women and campaigning for sex exemptions to be removed. 11. Promotion of guilt by association e.g. someone was targeting everyone who followed the husband of Sarah Ditum on twitter recently or the required recanting of anyone liking JK Rowlings tweet e.g Mark Hamill 12. Compelled language to show you're on the 'right side' e.g. allies should put their pronouns in their bio or email signatures 13. Calls for re-education or 'training' when an organisation or person doesn't agree, along with ostracising of those who dont comply And so on and so on. Are trans activists Nazis? I'd say no. That word is thrown about way too casually, but there is absolutely zero doubt that the movement is strongly totalitarian and deeply problematic.

I think a more accurate parallel would be the McCarthy era in the USA, where a ln accusation of "communist sympathy" worked much the same way as an accusation of "transphobia" today. Almost no evidence is required, guilt by association is rampant, people are losing jobs because of these accusations.

As someone with roots in Germany and Austria with family members at the time being all over the place politically (one was even a NAZI party member while another one was imprisoned by the NAZIs for political reasons, and the rest was somewhere in between) I will say that it were the abrasive ones, the 'pain in the ass' types who just can't shut up and keep the peace in the face of what they consider bullshit, even when their life depends on it, who spoke up and did not go along with the regime. The 'well adjusted' ones were always 'well adjusted', no matter the political environment. It was sobering for me to realize that.

deepwatersolo We also have a varied family background. My mother’s oldest sister married a German before the war. My mother spent part of her childhood living with them in Berlin but was sent back before the war. When war broke out, my aunt and uncle moved to a different part of Berlin and my aunt spent years not leaving the house- she was so scared of being found to be British.

My uncle was in the German army so a collaborator. They had four children and the children had to do everything administrative, shopping etc to keep their mother hidden - don’t know how I would categorise them. Nor do I know how I would categorise my aunt. I’ve often wondered what would have happened to her if she had been found out- would she have been sent back to the U.K., or put in prison or worse?

I mean I don’t know how I would categorise them during the war. Pre-war, my aunt clearly turned a blind eye to what was happening. She could have left with her children, but didn’t.

So I suppose the question is - how do you stop a totalitarian ideology from progressing, from gaining power?

In response to the claim that feminists are not being compared to vermin - just this last week I've read feminists being called swarms and other delightful things to imply our vermin status. And the rueful jokes we make about Gulags was in response to the apparently serious suggestion that we be sent to special new ones for the purpose of our re-education.

Honestly, the times I've seen this attempted dismissal of the creep of totalitarianism pointed out with the wounded cry "You're dismissing my dismissal" as though it's some kind of devastating come back. Sheesh.

Totalitarianism has had many faces throughout history, to our manifold shame as a species. To ignore the warning signs because it's not a carbon copy of what went before is one of the bloody reasons why we can't seem to shake it off. Fucksake.

There's a world of difference between being wrong and being evil. And once again, this article is about people who stand by while genocide takes place, not people who form erroneous opinions that don't include industrial scale murder. The two are very different.

Very few people are "evil" in the way meant here. Many, probably most, of the people who support evil outcomes or programs are a lot closer to being wrong, and being blind. They are pretty normal people.

I will say that it were the abrasive ones, the 'pain in the ass' types who just can't shut up and keep the peace in the face of what they consider bullshit, even when their life depends on it, who spoke up and did not go along with the regime. The 'well adjusted' ones were always 'well adjusted', no matter the political environment. It was sobering for me to realize that.

I've noticed this again and again around me. People who speak up when it's really required are often people who are and are perceived to be very difficult, problematic individuals.

JustTurtlesAllTheWayDown Excellent summary. Just seen a screenshot of it on Twitter.